I have always liked black frames around photos very much (like AIRIC makes them around his), the frame the frame even more, enhance colour and contrast and all in all make a photo look more presentable, so I think.

For the lack of any software that automatically puts frames round my photos, I came up with what I thought was a very clever idea! I opened up Paint, blackened a page with the inkpot, saved that as "black.jpg", opened up my photo, selected and copied that, then opened up "black.jpg" and pasted my photo in there. Pulled it where I wanted it to sit and saved it all together.

Then I opened my picture programme (HP Image Zone, the software that came with the scanner), selected "black.jpg" and cropped it to the regular photo-in-frame-size (using "eye-measurements").

Later I even came up with doing this process twice, first copying my photo into a previously stored as "white.jpg" sheet in Paint, cropping it to frame size in Image Zone, then onto a black page in Paint, cropping it again and saving it. All those steps!

Well, ok, but I was willing to take them until...........

....the other day I found out my photos were deteriorating in quality MUCHO!!!! So much so that I thought, hey now, how can compression make them look so bad, the did not look as bad previously!?!?!?

So here, for example, is one of the framed photos that made me so unhappy...

...while this is the (also reduced to websize, ie. a rought 640x480p) unframed variety of it:

Then it occurred to me that I might not want to save the background Paint-sheets as jpg's but much rather as the bmp's as they start out, anyway.

Results looked promising.

This is one other photo I was working with, saved in Photobucket as a jpg at 162 k, unframed, as you can see:

With the Paint-frames as jpg`s, I COULD no longer be happy, now could I?
Saved by Photobucket at 87k.

So I tried the bmp-variety and as long as the framed photos stayed "at home" I was fine. But Photobucket now does not like this format. The uploaded photo was given THIS size:
18k

No further need to discuss (and this is beyond my control, it is a Photobucket thing).

So I thought, well, let me try to frame the original photo size, not the reduced-to-websize version. Not easy, for I never saw the edges, the processes of saving the white sheet, black sheet, final sheet, used to take quite, quite long, and then I loaded it all into Photobucket. And it loaded, and loaded, and loaded and.... I gave up.

After 15 minutes (!) of loading time, this much had arrived:
It had been reduced to 143k, and OK size, but not for this price.

So in future: no more framed photos.
That is the result of all my testing.
Hmph.... I really like them surrounded by some black... but well.

Daniel, I think it's a time thing not a space thing?
I've maybe misunderstood here, but if you uploaded a BMP that would come out looking much smaller and take ages to upload, but if you converted the BMP to JPG before you sent it, then this should never have happened.
Take your image, paste in onto it's white background in BMP format. Paste it onto the Black background in BMP format, but then save it finally in JPG. (And if this is what you did, sorry I've mis-understood)

Well, no... erm ... in the end I also saved the whole thing as BMP...
But the whole framing process takes so much longer if the white and black Paint-sheets are bitmaps... I am not sure I really want to go to all that trouble with my photos. The end result would be that you will never get to see them at all, I'm afraid, for I tinker around with them too much...